improveosm – Page 2 – OpenStreetMap @ Grab

Fire up the editors: ImproveOSM updated with many new things to fix in OSM

Our OSM team continually processes billions of anonymized GPS traces we receive through the Scout app and partners, in order to discover things potentially wrong or missing in OSM. We call this effort ImproveOSM, and it is a big part of Telenav’s overall mission to keep making OSM even better.

Missing Roads in Northern Brazil. The denser the GPS point cloud, the more trips and the more likely you are helping people get around more accurately!

Our most recent update to ImproveOSM was a particularly big one. In the last month, we added:

133 thousand missing roads tiles
- Another 75 thousand tiles that are likely parking areas or tracks
- Another 670 thousand (!) water tiles (see below)
300 thousand suspected turn restrictions with over 50% high confidence

Using ImproveOSM data

Perhaps you have not looked at ImproveOSM data before. It is available through the ImproveOSM website, which is based on the iD editor. The screenshots on this page are from that website. If you know how to edit with iD, you will find it easy to work with ImproveOSM data and use it to edit OSM. We wrote a post that goes into more detail a little while ago.

If you prefer JOSM, we have created an ImproveOSM JOSM plugin as well. it works similar to the website: you choose what ImproveOSM data you want to see (suspected missing roads, suspected wrong one-way roads, or suspected missing turn restrictions, or all of the above!), and the plugin will show you the ImproveOSM data as a separate layer. We also have a blog post about using the JOSM plugin.

Finally, a few interesting/funny examples of ImproveOSM data around the world.

ImproveOSM data points out that a new road alignment is now in use. Aerial imagery and OSM have not been updated yet. This is in northern Sweden.

Here, we stumble upon an under-mapped town north of Surat, India. Of course, there are un- and under-mapped areas everywhere in the world, but the ImproveOSM data shows that there are people driving around on these streets using a GPS-enabled app or vehicle — people who would benefit from better OSM data in their everyday lives. It is not hard to find places like this around the world.

Finally, an animation showing clusters of ‘water’ tiles. This is a side effect of the partner data we process. Since it’s anonymized there is no way to say anything about why these traces exist. Useful for OSM? Perhaps. Interesting? I think so!

Are you finding interesting, useful, funny, or wrong data in ImproveOSM? Let us know! Happy Mapping!

More and Updated Data for ImproveOSM

ImproveOSM has been updated with many new roads. We processed recent GPS data from a number of data partners with some great results. A total of 30,000 new missing road tiles were added, over 17000 in Indonesia alone.

Aside from the missing roads, we added 67000 potential missing one-way roads that we detected with high confidence. Internal testing revealed only 6% false positives.

We are happy to continue providing OSM mappers with high-quality data about missing things in OSM based on billions of GPS traces. Because ImproveOSM is based on actual drives from people using navigation or mapping software in their vehicles, and we apply a pretty high threshold for the number of trips and quality of the GPS data, you can be pretty confident that every ImproveOSM feature will lead you to something you can add to OSM. Even if the aerial imagery is poor.

You should see the new data in your ImproveOSM plugin or on the ImproveOSM website very shortly. Happy mapping and let us know what you mapped using ImproveOSM!

Collaboration brings nearly 1 million missing roads to ImproveOSM

If you go to ImproveOSM today, you will notice that it looks a lot different. No, we are not talking about the recent change to a completely iD-based editing environment, although that was pretty neat too J. We are talking about the massive increase in Missing Road tiles worldwide!

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Missing roads everywhere!We added more than 800 thousand new road tiles to ImproveOSM all over the world. The anonymous GPS traces are sourced from INRIX, a company that provides traffic and connected car services. We are extremely excited to have such a huge boost to ImproveOSM and to OSM itself!

If you haven’t tried ImproveOSM recently, why not head over to improveosm.org right now and explore the millions of missing roads, one-way streets and turn restrictions detected from big data analysis on anonymous GPS traces from drivers all over the world?

You can read more about the collaboration with INRIX in the joint press release.

ImproveOSM now based on iD editor

With the help of ImproveOSM, Telenav’s project to analyze billions of GPS points to detect missing roads, one-ways, and turn restrictions, you have already looked at 60,000 missing road tiles, 15,000 one-way suggestions, and 2,000 turn restrictions suggestions since the project launched in September 2015.

Today, the Telenav OSM team has released a completely new version of the ImproveOSM website. ImproveOSM.org is now entirely based upon the OpenStreetMap iD editor. The new ImproveOSM combines the benefits of the familiar, user-friendly iD editing environment with the power of ImproveOSM detections.

The new ImproveOSM web site based on iD — The new ImproveOSM website based on iD

The new ImproveOSM website showing missing roads.

Since the new website is based on iD, it should look very familiar and you should have little trouble getting started with it. The main difference you will see is that the ImproveOSM version of iD has a special panel, which shows ImproveOSM specific options, actions, and information. If you have used ImproveOSM before, these will be familiar to you. You can mark items as solved or invalid and apply filters to determine which detections you see.

I do not want to go into too much detail in this post, but I do have a quick power tip: following up on many requests from you, you can now select multiple missing road tiles more easily by pressing shift and selecting one tile. This will automatically select all adjoining tiles within the current view.

Our goal is to integrate the ImproveOSM functionality into the main iD editor over time. To make that happen, your feedback is really important, so please do not hesitate to report bugs and ideas on the project GitHub page, where the source code will also become available soon.

We hope you enjoy the new ImproveOSM website and look forward to your feedback! Happy mapping!

Updates to ImproveOSM JOSM plugin for better usability

The team has been working on some nice updates to the ImproveOSM JOSM plugin. I have been taking the new version for a spin and wanted to report back.

In case you need a refresher: ImproveOSM is a suite of tools (currently a website and a JOSM plugin) that takes the results of a massive data analysis comparing billions of GPS data points with existing OSM data and displays them in a way that makes it easy for any mapper to improve OSM with missing roads, turn restrictions, and one-way tags.

Missing Roads (red), One-ways (orange) and Turn Restrictions (blue) in the clustered view of the ImproveOSM JOSM plugin. — Missing Roads (red), One-ways (orange), and Turn Restrictions (blue) in the clustered view of the ImproveOSM JOSM plugin. This is the Dallas, Texas area. Imagery from Bing.

The improvements are fairly small but gave me a noticeably nicer workflow, so I thought it would be worth sharing.

The first improvement is that you can now right-click on any of the ImproveOSM layers in the layer panel to access the data filtering options for that layer.

Access the data filters using a right-click on the layer panel.

The data filters let you see part of the data for that layer based on various criteria, such as the number of trips, confidence level, status, and others. The criteria available vary by layer. Here is the filter window for Missing Roads, for example:

Filter window for missing roads

The filters themselves are not new, but you needed to go to the ImproveOSM panel to access them before. I think this is way quicker.

Another thing I really like is the improved visualization for the turn restrictions. The team made it much easier to see the from-via-to flow of the suggested restriction. The from-segment is now green and the to-segment is red. When selected, the info panel will also display more useful information than before:

The new visualization of the missing turn restriction. The 'from' segment is green, the 'to' segment is red. — The new visualization of the missing turn restriction. The ‘from’ segment is green, the ‘to’ segment is red.

The metadata we display for a turn restriction is now more relevant.

The detailed info panel was improved for the other categories (missing roads and one-ways) as well.

Finally, when you are done mapping an ImproveOSM thing, you can now quickly mark the thing as invalid or solved, without having to enter a comment. We realized that this was not a very efficient workflow. You can still add a comment upon closing the issue, but now it’s easy to do it without, by right-clicking on the ‘solve’ or ‘invalidate’ buttons and selecting the appropriate action.

invalidate-context

These small but meaningful improvements made my work with ImproveOSM in JOSM much more efficient. We are always looking for more ways to make ImproveOSM better. If you have used ImproveOSM and you have a few minutes to spare, I would appreciate it if you filled out this survey. Thanks a lot!

Improve OSM adds missing roads in Guatemala

In a new data released today, we added about 500 tiles worth of missing roads in and around Guatemala!

Missing roads near Coatepeque, Guatemala in JOSM. Imagery from Bing.

We are excited to be adding more and more Missing Roads data to ImproveOSM using GPS data from our own users as well as from data partners like we did in Brazil and in this case.

You will notice that the tiles look a little different from the ones you are used to if you have used ImproveOSM before: they don’t show the individual points. This is because this particular data was processed a little differently. If you use JOSM, you will also see an update to the ImproveOSM plugin to accommodate this change.

While you are looking at the new Missing Roads, perhaps you will also notice some other recent improvements to the ImproveOSM website. We re-ran all tiles based on new map data from mid-April, and we improved our turn restriction detection so we won’t show a missing turn restriction when OSM already has an ‘only straight on’ restriction.

Happy Mapping!